How are smartphones affecting your sales?

March 10, 2011

A customer looking at one of your bikes is also peering into his cell phone. You can assume he’s texting, e-mailing or using Facebook, right? Not always.

More customers today are using smartphones as research tools inside stores. They’re using anything from barcode scanners for comparison of online parts prices to competing dealers’ websites, putting their prices head-to-head with yours.

Think it’s not happening in your store? Chew on some of these facts. A Smartphone Intelligence Survey by Compete, a national media company, reported 28 percent of smartphone owners have used barcode scanning apps, and more than half of those people have compared prices from store to store using their mobile devices.

But smartphones aren’t all bad; they can be used to create sales as well. Nearly 80 percent of smartphone users in 10 countries, including the United States, said they find it useful to download money-off coupons to their smartphones, and 57 percent said they would shop more frequently at stores that use smartphone-friendly technology, according to an Accenture survey.

How should you handle this trend? I’m going to talk to experts and find out, but I need your help as well. We at Powersports Business want to know how smartphone use has affected your dealership and which aspects of the new technology you would like to learn about. Please click here join in our survey. We’ll have results and further information about consumer smartphone use in an upcoming issue.